L.A.’s Vintage Bookstores

Image

Inside the Last Bookstore in downtown L.A.CreditCreditJoe Leavenworth

By Lesley M. M. Blume

May 11, 2017

Seventy-seven-year-old Harvey Jason may be the only antiquarian bookseller to inspire an action figure. Before turning to the literary life, he was an actor. In 1997, while playing Ajay Sidhu in “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” Jason turned to director Steven Spielberg and informed him: “When we wrap this picture, I’m in the book business.”

Now the proprietor of Mystery Pier Books Inc., which he runs with his son Louis, Jason occasionally tinkers with the Ajay doll when sitting at his desk; it otherwise resides on a shelf, nestled between first editions of James Joyce and Nabokov. Jason’s store, you see, peddles exclusively first-edition and first-printing fare, along with other historical goodies. For your consideration: 18th-century copies of Shakespeare plays; rare, signed works by J.D. Salinger; enviable Hemingways.

I am a nuisance presence in such places — a shallow-pocketed writer who cannot afford these works. But I covet them. (One Mystery Pier item tempting me to the precipice of theft: Cecil B. DeMille’s personal copy of “The Great Gatsby,” complete with linen box and DeMille bookplate — a bargain at $7,500.) As a historical journalist and biographer, my life is populated with dusty, out-of-print tomes; when I moved last year from New York City to Los Angeles, I carted along with me over 3,000 books. And I still want more.

Image

A first edition from West L.A.’s SideShow Rare and Remarkable Books, Art & Curiosities.CreditJoe Leavenworth

Within weeks of my arrival, I had already hunted down a passel of the most eccentric rare and vintage bookstores in town. To my great pleasure, these stores offered a highly specific and often amusing glimpse into the soul and workings of my adopted city. Despite its richly deserved reputation for superficiality, Los Angeles is indeed a reading town, but with a uniquely transactional relationship to books, especially those that are remnants of bygone eras.

The Jasons, for example, are occasionally contacted by the heads of studios and agencies who want to buy expensive gifts for directors and actors. One tasked Harvey Jason with sourcing several books at $2,500 a pop for a film team, including the director and some principal actors. When they called back to request one more at $500, “I asked, $500? Who is that for?” he recalls. “And they said, ‘The writer.’ They didn’t see the irony.”

At least these books made it, presumably, into their recipients’ hands intact. “Studios only contact us for books to use on sets,” says Lacy Soto, the manager of the Art and Rare Books Annex at the Last Bookstore in Downtown Los Angeles, whose best-selling titles include mid-20th-century American classics and books by Angeleno writers. “They say, ‘We need 10 feet of books, and they’re all going to get blown up.’ ”

Image

Tony Jacobs of SideShow started his book operation online in 1998, and then established his physical store in 2009.CreditJoe Leavenworth

Not that the store doesn’t have ample stock to spare for such pyrotechnics: Books are so plentiful at this cavernous, 22,000-square-foot temple that they have been repurposed into Instagrammable architecture. On the second floor stands a book wall with a porthole carved into it; nearby is a walk-through tunnel. The novelty draws tourists from around the world, some of whom are even lured into purchasing a loose book.

On the other side of town, at SideShow Rare and Remarkable Books, Art & Curiosities — which has an aesthetic best described as shack-like — producers occasionally paw through the midcentury pulp fiction collection for material. “They’re always tracking down old action-adventure series, either from the pulps or from ’70s series like ‘The Black Samurai,’ ” the owner Tony Jacobs says. “It’s like an archive of narrative.”

Back in New York, I’d worried about leaving the city’s landscape of eccentric characters behind, but my L.A. rare book haunts quickly assured me that this town too is a repository of idiosyncrasy. Many of the owners might have themselves been conjured up in character treatments. Ms. Soto of the Last Bookstore — an employee of libraries and bookstores since the age of 14 — resembles an elongated, purple-haired Uma Thurman from “Pulp Fiction,” and has the patina of a glamorous assassin. Several blocks away, at the decades-old Caravan Book Store, the owner Leonard Bernstein concedes that customers come to behold his expressive white mustache as much as they come for the log-cabin atmosphere (complete with Franklin-like stove and arrows) and the books on Old West history.

At Indigo Seas in Beverly Grove — boasting a stash of vintage lost generation and cafe society tomes sourced from Paris’s beloved Shakespeare and Company — the grande-dame owner Lynn von Kersting serves pecan bars from the Ivy restaurant next door (which she co-owns), amid a sea of flowers clipped from her own gardens. A product of the dolce vita world she’s selling at Indigo Seas, she will very occasionally tell you about her encounters with Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. Hours will go by and you’ll emerge at sunset, bewildered to find yourself on N. Robertson Boulevard rather than on the Riviera.

Most of these people don’t know that they’ve become my people, but they have. This new chapter of my life is now synonymous with their stores and the books they’ve sold me (including histories of the notorious Hollywood Garden of Allah hotel, sad tales about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s MGM years and guides to old Hollywood’s scandalous mistresses, among other such noble fare). It’s curious how the characters in these pages and those selling the pages have come, in my mind, to belong to the same vanishing yet sacred world.